Glossary of Computer Terms

Computer Terms Glossary

This page is meant to serve as a guide to the vast
quantity of computer terms and acronyms in common use for the
casual computer user. It is divided into two main sections,
the first is dedicated to the basics and
is meant more for beginners, while the second is meant instead to be used as a
reference. In reality many of the terms in the second section
are still quite common; the first section was deliberately
kept as short as possible.

Terms in the second section may be looked up by either
using the "find in page" function of your browser, or by
appending "#term" (without the quotes and where
term is the term of interest) to the "URL" or "go
to" section of your browser, keeping in mind that case
matters. The best method of searching for a term though is
to use the Search
Interface that will return not only the specific term
sought but also other entries that reference it. Be aware
that the terms referenced in the second part of this page
will freely assume familiarity with the first part.

If you want something added or see a problem with
something already here (but keep in mind this guide is not
meant to be overly technical) please send .

Basic

hardware

The physical portion of the computer.

hypertext

A hypertext document is like a text document with the
ability to contain pointers to other regions of (possibly
other) hypertext documents.

Reference

HP-UX

HP-UX is the version of UNIX designed
by Hewlett-Packard to work with their
PA-RISC and
68xx based machines.

HTML

The Hypertext
Mark-up Language is the
language currently most frequently used to
express web pages (although it is rapidly being replaced by XHTML). Every
browser has the built-in ability to
understand HTML. Some browsers can additionally
understand Java and browse
FTP areas. HTML is a proper subset of SGML.

http

The hypertext
transfer protocol is
the native protocol of
browsers and is most typically used to
transfer HTML formatted files. The
secure version is called "https".

Hurd

The Hurd is the official GNUOS. It is still in development
and is not yet supported on too many different
processors, but promises
to be the most powerful OS available. It (like all the GNU
software) is free.

Hz & hertz

Hertz means cycles per second, and makes no assumptions about what is cycling. So, for example, if a fluorescent light flickers once per jiffy, it has a 60 Hz flicker. More typical for computers would be a program that runs once per jiffy and thus has a 60 Hz frequency, or larger units of hertz like kHz, MHz, GHz, or THz.